In another article you can see more information about the sports principles that guide and direct planning. Important note; I'll teach very general guidelines and "tricks" extracted from my experience to help you design a general valid plan for amateur players. Obviously not the kind of more complex and elaborate professional planning that I use as a fitness - football coach in professional teams, which as well as being customised, requires much more data and actions, and depending on many factors, gets re -planned almost every week.

What I mean is that if you want to apply this model to a junior or youth team, it will be perfect, but if you want something more professional, we need to plan in another way.

Before starting the planning we have to do Football Periodisation. This issue was discussed in a previous article. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do it because it's essential to understand planning.

It would also be desirable than you read the article on training load since we will explain planning using the volume and intensity parameters that are well explained in that article.

How do we order the training sessions?

As we know, each training session is different....exercises, time, reps, intensity, specificity etc. By managing these parameters we can do more or less complex sessions, specific ones, etc. As I explained in the article concerning the workload parameters, this is defined among others, by volume (working time, distance and / or repetitions) and intensity (execution speed, height, weight, etc). We are going to arrange these factors to organize the loads.

How to distribute volume? What will the intensity be like?

As I said in the introduction, I'll give you a few tricks for you to design planning in a simple way. We will support it in the traditional model of a Mateuev 1956 peak shape model.

First we must know the range of work in which we will move with these parameters. Suppose we train the aerobic and anaerobic resistance applied to 15 year old football players. The maximum volume would be 25 minutes. Over 25 minutes is not necessary for football players at this age.

The maximum intensity will be the maximum speed they can reach and the maximum heart rate. At this age approximately 208-215 beats per minute (bpm).

We score three points in the periodisation:

***a) start of training,

***b) half of the total training period,

***c) end of the session.

Points a) and c) indicate the minimum level of the volume parameter i.e. on these days/sessions the work will be minimal from the perspective of volume. There will be very few repetitions, few distances and short training time.

In point b) we will set the maximum volume, in this session, we will work as long as the maximum repetitions, we will travel the greatest distance.

Following our previous example, it will be for 25 minutes. We draw an arc beginning at a) and ending in c) through b).

For intensity we mark three other points:

***a) start of the session,

***b) 2/3 or 60% elapsed of the period

***c) at the end of periodisation.

We mark:

a) as the minimum intensity. It will be a light session, most of the time at an average speed. There will be sprints at full speed, 130-140 bpm.

b) Average intensity; a session a bit quicker. There will be actions with more speed, 160 - 175 bpm and

c) the maximum training intensity; short runs at full intensity, 190 - Maximum bpm with extensive recovery between repetitions.

When we have to design training sessions taking only these two parameters, look what we have:

Day 1 Session: low volume and low intensity Both begin to rise, although the volume will do so much faster than the intensity. 10 minutes of aerobic exercise such as running at an intensity of 130-140 bpm

Session towards half the periodisation: maximum volume starting a decline, and low intensity ascending to medium 25 minutes of resistance training at an intensity of 150-160 bpm

Session towards 2/3 of periodisation: medium volume, steady decline andmedium intensity ascending to maximum 15 minutes of resistance training at intensities of 160-170 bpm.

Last session of periodisation: Minimum volume (starts to decline from the middle of periodisation, maximum intensity (start to ascend from the first session short sprints training, total duration 10 minutes, at maximum intensity 190+

What are these graphs for?

Once the planning has been designed, it is very easy to determine what will be the parameters in each session. You just have to choose the date and estimate the value of volume and intensity. Finally when choosing the exercises, you just have to match the values of the charts with the exercises.

Continuing the above example, one month after starting the periodisation parameters are: volume 12 minutes, and intensity 150-160 bpm (as shown in the graph, the intensity must rise very slowly).

The question is how we handle the parameters of the first and last day with the same volume and totally different intensities?

Good question! The answer is not easy.

Remember we talked about aerobic endurance (long distance runs) and anaerobic resistance (short to very short runs). The first day we do an exercise similar to running 10 minutes at a gentle speed of 130-140 bpm. It's not the same; please do not have the players run around the field without an objective. Instead the last day, players will do (maximum) actions of short duration such as making shots on goal after receiving a pass inside the free space. The player will have to go through those meters "and suddenly stop" to control the ball and shoot. How long?

In total 10 minutes of work.

For example the football player could have 4 shots (it will take 15 seconds or less), rest and stretch for 2 minutes and continue to do 10 minutes total.

4 * 15 seconds = 1 minute. With 10 minutes = 10 repetitions.

Total 10 reps 4 short runs + shots of 15 seconds of duration at full intensity. Recovery between reps 2 minutes.

For this training you must calculate a total time of 30 minutes (10 of work + 20 recovery).

If you follow these graphs of volume and intensity, you will see how easy it is to plan training loads and work sessions for your players.

I really hope you enjoyed this article that it is of assistance to you. If you liked it and if you know another coach or anyone else who might be interested in this topic please forward this article to that person's email, thanks.

If you want to ask me something, please do so.